If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

The archetype of the Creator is a familiar image in his work. Here, Blake depicts his demiurgic figure Urizen stooped in prayer, contemplating the world he has forged. The Song of Los is the third in a series of illuminated books painted by Blake and his wife, collectively known as the Continental Prophecies.

Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.

There Is No Natural Religion (1788)

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

All Religions are One (1788)

There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil; it is persecution to others or selfishness.

Annotations to Swedenborg (1788)

If a thing loves, it is infinite.

Annotations to Swedenborg (1788)

Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?

Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose Public RECORDS to be True.

Annotations to An Apology for the Bible by R. Watson

That the Jews assumed a right Exclusively to the benefits of God. will be a lasting witness against them. & the same will it be against Christians

Annotations to An Apology for the Bible by R. Watson

And now let me finish with assuring you that, Tho I have been very unhappy, I am so no longer. I am again. Emerged into the light of day; I still & shall to Eternity Embrace Christianity and Adore him who is the Express image of God; but I have travel'd thro' Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion. I have Conquer'd, and shall still Go on Conquering. Nothing can withstand the fury of my Course among the Stars of God & in the Abysses of the Accuser. My Enthusiasm is still what it was, only Enlarged and conform'd.

The Foundation of Empire is Art & Science Remove them or Degrade them & the Empire is No More — Empire follows Art & Not Vice Versa as Englishmen suppose.

Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses

When a Man has Married a Wife
He finds out whether
Her Knees & elbows are only
glued together.

Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1800–1803)

When nations grow old, the Arts grow cold,
And Commerce settles on every tree.

On Art And Artists (1800) 'On the Foundation of the Royal Academy'

Fiery the Angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll'd
Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc.

America, A Prophecy.

Blake's "A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows", an illustration to J. G. Stedman's Narrative, of a Five Years' Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796).

Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.

Blake's Exhibition and Catalogue of 1809, A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures: Number V. The Ancient Britons

Art can never exist without Naked Beauty displayed.

The Laocoön

Art is the tree of life.
SCIENCE is the Tree of DEATH
ART is the Tree of LIFEGOD is JESUS

The Laocoön

Jesus & his apostles & disciples were all artists

The Laocoön, p. 271

Commerce is so far from being beneficial to Arts or to Empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their History shows, for the above Reason of Individual Merit being its Great Hatred. Empires flourish till they become Commercial & then they are scattered abroad to the four winds

Public Address, Blake's Notebook c. 1810

When I tell any Truth it is not for the sake of Convincing those who do not know it but for the sake of defending those who Do

Public Address, Blake's Notebook c. 1810

Every Harlot was a Virgin once

For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise: [Epilogue] To The Accuser who is The God of This World

It is not because Angels are Holier than Men or Devils that makes them Angels but because they do not Expect Holiness from one another but from God only

A Vision of the Last Judgment

Thinking as I do that the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being & being a Worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying: "the Son, O how unlike the Father!" First God Almighty comes with a Thump on the Head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it.

A Vision of the Last Judgment

This world of imagination is the world of eternity.

A Vision of the Last Judgment

You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue & you cannot have Moral Virtue without the Slavery of that half of the Human Race who hate what you call Moral Virtue

A Vision of the Last Judgment

I assert, for myself, that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. "What !" it will be questioned, "when the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea !" Oh ! no, no ! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty !" I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it.

A Vision of the Last Judgment

…some say that Happiness is not Good for Mortals & they ought to be answerd that Sorrow is not fit for Immortals & is utterly useless to any one a blight never does good to a tree & if a blight kill not a tree but it still bear fruit let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.

Letter to William Hayley (1803-10-07)

The Goddess Fortune is the devils servant ready to Kiss any ones Arse.

Blake's "Newton" is a demonstration of his opposition to the "single-vision" of scientific materialism: The great philosopher-scientist is isolated in the depths of the ocean, his eyes (only one of which is visible) fixed on the compasses with which he draws on a scroll. He seems almost at one with the rocks upon which he sits (1795).

How sweet I roamed from field to field,
And tasted all the summer's pride,
Till I the prince of love beheld,
Who in the sunny beams did glide!

Song (How Sweet I Roamed), st. 1

He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.

Like a fiend in a cloud,
With howling woe,
After night I do crowd,
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east,
From whence comforts have increased;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain.

Mad Song, st. 3

How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoyed in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forced, the notes are few!

On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
"Pipe a song about a Lamb."
So I piped with merry cheer…

Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
"Pipe a song about a Lamb."
So I piped with merry cheer;
"Piper, pipe that song again."
So I piped; he wept to hear.

Introduction, st. 1–2

And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.

Introduction, st. 5

Sing louder around
To the bells' cheerful sound,
While our sports shall be seen
On the ecchoing green.

The Ecchoing Green, st. 1

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly bright.

The Lamb, st. 1

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black as if bereaved of light.

The Little Black Boy, st. 1

And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

The Little Black Boy, st. 4

I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our Father's knee;
And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him and he will then love me.

The Little Black Boy, st. 7

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!'weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

The Chimney Sweeper, st. 1

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

The Divine Image, st. 1

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

The Divine Image, st. 3

The moon like a flower
In heaven's high bower,
With silent delight,
Sits and smiles on the night.

Night, st. 1

And there the lion's ruddy eyes
Shall flow with tears of gold,
And pitying the tender cries,
And walking round the fold,
Saying: "Wrath by his meekness,
And by his health, sickness,
Is driven away
From our immortal day."

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.

Lines 8–9

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

Line 10

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

Line 11

The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can measure.

Line 12

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

Line 15

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

Line 18

Prisons are built with stones of law; brothels with bricks of religion.

Line 21

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

Line 22

The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.

Line 35

One thought fills immensity.

Line 36

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

Line 37

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

Line 39

Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.

Line 41

The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

Line 44

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Line 46

The weak in courage is strong in cunning.

Line 49

When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius; lift up thy head!

Line 54

Exuberance is Beauty.

Line 64

Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.

Line 66

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.

Line 69

Enough! or too much.

Line 70

The ancient poets animated all objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.

What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

Letter to Revd. Dr. Trusler (23 August 1799)

What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

But Want of Money & the Distress of A Thief can never be alleged as the Cause of his Thieving, for many honest people endure greater hard ships with Fortitude. We must therefore seek the Cause else where than in want of Money for that is the Misers passion, not the Thiefs.

Fun I love, but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsom. Mirth is better than Fun & Happiness is better than Mirth.

To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & and a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule and Deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers..

Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment.

The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible

Preface

Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War.

Ibid

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's;
I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.

Poetry fettered fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed, or flourish, in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish!

To the Public, plate 1

I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's;
I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.

Ch. 1, plate 10, lines 20-21 The Words of Los

I see the Four-fold Man.
The Humanity in deadly sleep,
And its fallen Emanation. The Spectre & its cruel Shadow.
I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once
Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!

Ch. 1, plate 15, lines 6-9

He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars;
General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer:
For art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

Ch. 3, plate 55, line 60

What is a Wife & what is a Harlot? What is a Church & What
Is a Theatre? are they Two & not One? can they Exist Separate?
Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing? Brotherhood is Religion
O Demonstrations of Reason Dividing Families in Cruelty & Pride!

Ch. 3, plate 57

England! awake! awake! awake!
Jerusalem thy sister calls!
Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death
And close her from thy ancient walls?

The vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision's greatest enemy.
Thine has a great hook nose like thine;
Mine has a snub nose like to mine.
Thine is the Friend of all Mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates;Thy heaven doors are my hell gates.

If He had been Antichrist, Creeping Jesus,
He’d have done anything to please us;
Gone sneaking into synagogues,
And not us’d the Elders and Priests like dogs;
But humble as a lamb or ass
Obey’d Himself to Caiaphas.

God wants not man to humble himself:
That is the trick of the Ancient Elf.
This is the race that Jesus ran:
Humble to God, haughty to man,
Cursing the Rulers before the people
Even to the Temple’s highest steeple,
And when He humbled Himself to God
Then descended the cruel rod.
‘If Thou Humblest Thyself, Thou humblest Me.
Thou also dwell’st in Eternity.

This life's dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye.

Seeing this False Christ, in fury and passion
I made my voice heard all over the nation.
…
I am sure this Jesus will not do
Either for Englishman or Jew.

Only Nietzsche and Blake know a wholly fallen Godhead, a Godhead which is an absolutely alien Nihil, but the full reversal of that Nihil is apocalypse itself, an apocalypse which is an absolute joy, and Blake and Nietzsche are those very writers who have most evoked that joy. ~ Thomas J. J. Altizer

What is most needed today is a fundamental theological thinking, one centered upon the Godhead itself, and centered upon that which is most challenging or most offensive in the Godhead, one which has truly been veiled in the modern world, except by our most revolutionarythinkers and visionaries. If we allow Blake and Nietzsche to be paradigmatic of those revolutionaries, nowhere else does such a centering upon God or the Godhead occur, although a full parallel to this occurs in Spinoza and Hegel; but the language of Hegel and Spinoza is not actually offensive, or not in its immediate impact, whereas the language of Nietzsche and Blake is the most purely offensive language which has ever been inscribed. Above all this is true of the theological language of Blake and Nietzsche, but here a theological language is a truly universal language, one occurring in every domain, and occurring as that absolute No which is the origin of every repression and every darkness, and a darkness which is finally the darkness of God, or the darkness of that Godhead which is beyond “God.” Only Nietzsche and Blake know a wholly fallen Godhead, a Godhead which is an absolutely alien Nihil, but the full reversal of that Nihil is apocalypse itself, an apocalypse which is an absolute joy, and Blake and Nietzsche are those very writers who have most evoked that joy.

To me, it seems best to read Blake in company with his truest peers, Shakespeare and Milton, and with his greatest contemporaries, Wordsworth and Shelley. He was a visionary, rather than a mystic, and, like D. H. Lawrence and Sigmund Freud, he hoped to encourage us to exalt our human potential. Perhaps Blake can be best termed an apocalyptic humanist, who urges us never to forget that all deities reside in the human breast.

It is not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as "revolutionary" — and revolution, after all, means turning things upside down — as the politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like "I wander through each charter'd street" than in three-quarters of Socialist literature.

In the modern world, the Romantics were the last major cultural movement to assert the "truth of the imagination," defending art as a way of knowing the world that equalled or surpassed scientific reason. In their resistance to what Blake called "Satan's Mathematik Holiness," their goal was not to reject science but to enlarge it. ...the Romantics sought to understand by augmentation.

Betty and Theodore Roszak, "Deep Form in Art and Nature" Alexandria 4, Vol.4 The Order of Beauty and Nature (1997) ed. David Fideler

Blake deeply admired science; he never failed to portray it heroically. But he was concerned that science saw the universe from an odd angle that hid as much as it revealed. Science screened the value of things, the beauty of things, the sacredness of things as if these qualities might not really be there. Blake called this Single Vision, and contrasted it with his ideal Fourfold vision: an understanding that included the poetic, the sensuous, and the visionary along with the rational. ...he fervently prayed for our culture to be saved from the scientist's severe abbreviation of reality: "God us keep from Single Vision and Newton's Sleep."

Theodore Roszak, The Gendered Atom (1999)

Freud was frank to admit that Romantic artists like Blake had discovered the unconscious before he had. But... he could hardly adopt Blake's unsettling view of the scientific psyche.

Most scientists would make very hard work of explaining how the concept of soul fits into the material universe, where there is nothing but "atoms and the void." Was this what Blake meant when he said that science was a tree of death? The death of religion? Of imagination? Both have been frequently suggested. ...Science is certainly our prime weapon against superstition and irrationalism, but in a world in which science flourishes—with of without God—love and fear remain, as do pleasure and regret, poetry and humor, art and music. The arts are not lessened by the sciences. Blake was mistaken: man's ineradicable gift, his questing curiosity, the divine discontent, is the common source of the arts and sciences.

Brian L. Silver, The Ascent of Science (1998)

It may seem to be a long way from Blake's innocent talk of love and copulation to De Sade's need to inflict pain. And yet both are the outcome of a sexual mysticism that strives to transcend the everyday world. Simone de Beauvoir said penetratingly of De Sade's work that 'he is trying to communicate an experience whose distinguishing characteristic is, nevertheless its will to remain incommunicable'. De Sade's perversion may have sprung from his dislike of his mother or of other women, but its basis is a kind of distorted religious emotion.